Inside The Muscle Cell

Thanks to new technology, scientists are gaining deeper insight into muscle plasticity, with the potential to change the way you think about fitness, health and perhaps life itself

- Lou Schuler

On a Saturday morning in a research lab at Cal State Fullerton, doctor Andy Galpin approaches my left quadriceps with a hollow-point needle designed to extract a chunk of muscle tissue. The sensation, he tells me, “will feel like a biopsy”.

SINCE I’VE NEVER had a biopsy, telling me the procedure feels like itself is like saying dingo tastes like dingo; the information is illuminating only if you’re really into feral meat. But Galpin, who estimates that he’s been on the pointy end of 40 biopsies over the past dozen years, says there’s really no other way to describe it. He’s an associate professor at the Centre for Sports Performance at Fullerton and has skin (and flesh) in this game.

For the first few seconds, as Galpin plunges the surgical equivalent of a post-hole digger into my thigh, it feels like a primaryschool bully pressing his knuckle into my leg. Then the sensation shifts into reverse as he pulls out. A grad student bandages the half-centimetre hole while Galpin transfers the excised piece of my vastus lateralis muscle from the needle to a petri dish. I see the sample up close a few minutes later: four parallel strips of tissue, each perhaps a centimetre long and a millimetre wide. Under a microscope they look like four tuna steaks. Galpin estimates that each microfillet contains at least 500 individual fibres. But they won’t look appetising for long. After stewing for a week in a juice called “skinning solution,” the colour will disappear and Galpin will be able to pull single fibres from the translucent mass.